Why Millennial Audiences Get 'Get Out'

Get Out, Jordan Peele’s (of Key & Peele fame) directorial debut is earning rave reviews and topping the box office. It’s a smart, tense and sharply satirical look at the micro and macro horrors of being black in contemporary America and it packs an intellectual and visceral wallop. Chris, a talented young photographer, is invited by his girlfriend Rose to visit her parents for the weekend. Things quickly go from awkward to bloody, with Daniel Kaluuya imbuing Chris with a cautious world weariness developed, no doubt, from years of interacting with seemingly well-meaning but tone-deaf people like Rose's parents, the Armitages. Eventually, as people and events get stranger and stranger, this caution morphs into fear and, ultimately, a basic drive for survival.

Peele, also the film's writer, covers a huge amount of ground in Get Out’s taut 103-minute run time. He skewers the self-satisfaction of white liberals who consider (or at least represent) themselves as allies. He tackles the idea of white ownership of black bodies and the stereotyping of black men as both animalistic and sexualized. He offers a smart allegory for the appropriation of black culture (and subsequent dilution or clueless mishandling) by white people and a wry commentary on what happens when white people decide they know how to improve the lives of minorities (hint: bad fashion choices are involved). He pokes gentle fun at stereotypically “white” middle-class and above pursuits and preferences. Rose’s man-bunned brother dresses like the frontman of a Mumford And Sons cover band and is seen, at various junctures, strumming a ukulele and wielding a lacrosse stick. Rose listens to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in her riding pants and sensible white dress shirt. The room in which Chris is held captive also contains foosball and ping-pong tables, as if a gaggle of startup bros may show up at any moment. Peele even finds time to skewer common horror tropes. In another film, Chris’s goofy buddy Rod would be killed off early; here he’s the only one able to see the truth and save the day. Rose (Allison Williams is an inspired bit of casting in this role, as Vulture points out) would be the final girl in a more conventional horror film, while here she’s merely the final obstacle to Chris’s escape.

I saw Get Out with a theater full of college kids, split fairly evenly between black and white. It was the first movie I’ve watched in a long time where the audience actually clapped and cheered at pivotal moments. I’m not so presumptuous or naive as to claim that their enthusiasm for watching Chris triumph over those who would literally strip him of his humanity is strictly a result of millennials/gen z being fully “woke” when it comes to racism. While research offers conflictingfindings about just how open-minded and accepting young adults are, that research was conducted before Nazi punching became a meme, before a travel ban that sparked protests at airports across the country, before the confirmation of a host of rich, white businesspeople to the president’s cabinet, before the planned rollbacks of the ACA and protections for transpeople etc. You get the picture. I can’t help but think the reaction of the audience I saw Get Out with was both informed and galvanized by all of that. After all, Rose's family is privileged. They have black servants and rich white friends. While they and their friends are superficially pleasant (at least until the bad stuff goes down), they’re also smug, insular and self-congratulatory. They’re the “haves” that the majority of college students watching Get Out will A) never grow into given the present economic and political climate in which we exist and B) whom they resent for putting the world (and the environment) into its current state and then turning around to claim that young people are entitled loafers who expect everything to be handed to them. There is a real catharsis in cheering proxies of this hypocritical ruling class getting their bloody comeuppance.

It’s not a good time to be young in America and, arguably, it’s never been a good time to be black in America, so to see a movie in which a young black man beats the odds stacked against him by society, especially in 2017, is something worth cheering about. Get Out gets that and so do millennial movie-goers.

I am a journalist, entrepreneur and marketing firm founder. I write about higher ed and early career issues. Pithily. I was pontificating about Millennials and Millennial culture back when they were still known as Gen Y.